Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Product Ownership Practices
Wednesday, November 6
What “Good” Looks Like: The 4 Quadrants of Product Ownership
The product owner role was introduced in Scrum in 1993, so the role has been around for more than twenty-five years. Yet we still struggle with the nature of it. Is it simple or complex? Is it inward- or outward-facing? It is about backlogs and stories, or something more? And is ownership the whole point? Bob Galen will share his 4 Quadrants model for what "good" product ownership looks like in the real world. It will start with balance, because the role is so broad and deep in its nuance. There are product, project, analyst, and leadership parts to the product owner role, and we’ll...
Example Mapping: The New Three Amigos
Example mapping is a collaboration technique used by teams to help refine requirements. Every team should have a set of “ready” criteria that includes some kind of workshop between development team members to establish a shared understanding. In a time-boxed example mapping session, rules will summarize examples or constraints about a user story, and questions about outcomes or dependencies are documented for future refinement. The end result is requirements written as user behavior, with a shared understanding among all roles on the agile team. Come ready to participate in a live example...
The MVP Mental Model
Here is a question we should all ask ourselves when building new software: Am I building in small chunks? Thinking and actions around the minimum viable product (MVP) are vital in creating a shift to full team and organizational agility. Agile methods work great when building, testing, and learning in small, discernible, discrete pieces is the norm. If there is not a shift to smaller increments or even an understanding of how to do that, the agile transformation is going to be in trouble. Jim Grunder will show how to move team and organizational planning approaches to fundamentally smaller...
Thursday, November 7
KonMari Your Backlog: Tidying Up Those PBIs
Have you tidied up your personal life with Marie Kondo and are now wondering how to achieve the same effect in your work life? Do you have the feeling that the most valuable product backlog items (PBIs) are getting lost under a mountain of old stories, bugs, and tasks? If so, join Julie Wyman to learn how to adapt the KonMari method to tidy up your product backlog. Julie will share a short quiz you can use to gauge the current state of your own backlog and walk through five easy steps you can take to get started in your tidying process. She'll also share real-life examples, call out...
Continuous Deployment for 'Mature' Codebases
When starting up a greenfield project, it’s easy to take advantage of the most modern development practices. But what about the rest of us, who are working on codebases greater than five minutes old? How do you take code that’s four years and hundreds of thousands of SLOC, and turn that into a lean, mean, continuous-deploying machine? In this talk, Melissa Benua will walk through what continuous integration and deployment means for teams working on mature code bases, and what the roadmap looks like to get from a release cycle that may take weeks or months to one that deploys on-demand....
Build a Healthy Product Backlog with User Story Mapping
PreviewSuccessful agile software development depends on a healthy product backlog. Too often, teams attempting to adopt an agile methodology for a project with a new product owner struggle in their transition due to a sparse product backlog. Bala Lakshminarayan will show how user story mapping can let a product owner quickly build a product backlog for the team, leveraging the subject matter experts in the organization from development, QA, UX and design, product management, sales, and marketing. Bala will thoroughly explain user story mapping and personas through a hands-on workshop...
The Inner Game of User Stories
When agile teams are working, the all-important stories stay on the wall (or, worse, in a tool). They sometimes get seen, touched, and loved only once a day. Why are the stories not the focus of the work? Why do we take our eye off the ball and allow distractions to take over? Is there something more important than value? Inspired by the book The Inner Game of Tennis and the impact it's had on athletes' mindset for more than forty years, we'll look at some ideas for getting out of your own way so you can let the best story emerge and focus on what is really important. Join Cory Bryan to...